Graciella and Other Stories

Thirteen short stories covering the distance from Hell to the high peaks of the Rockies. Terence is inexplicably sent to Hell. Why, he asks? How can he escape? Matthew Ash, world famous author, meets his intellectual and romantic match at Roosevelt Lodge beneath the snow-covered peaks of the Rocky Mountains. A teacher and a young black girl endure the dangers and despair in a world shattered by a cataclysmic event. Sarah Liebowitz, artist and mystic genius, plans to take a step into eternity by creating her latest work of impossible proportions. An Irish immigrant enters the New World and witnesses poverty, despair, cultural hatred...and the building of a glorious bridge. A young, famous artist has reached the end of his creative rope. His series of paintings depicting black in all its angst-ridden possibilities finally collapses when a C-movie mogul offers him a real job. At a Jasper Cohen bash one night, Rex meets Andrea, who challenges him to investigate light in all its magnificent manifestations. Little does Rex know... Winner of the 2015 Official Member Writing Contest (OMWC). An administrator to the Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad is sent on a mission to establish the arts and sciences in a small city sitting on the banks of the Tigris in 1,000 A.D. "I am ugly. Not homely or plain or cursed with a feature which any vain and wealthy person would, on a whim, have altered by a plastic surgeon. It goes deeper than that. Had I been born with two noses and a single eye I would have been more handsome-at least I've been told so...but I am in love with Graciella."